By Africa.com | Created at 2026-09-08 09:30:11 | Updated at 2026-09-08 10:29:26
1 hour ago
Food4Education Founder and CEO honored in Venice alongside Jane Fonda, Prime Minister Mia Mottley, Lynsey Addario and Gisèle Pelicot
Kenyan social innovator and Food4Education Founder and CEO Wawira Njiru received the 2026 DVF Award in Venice Thursday night, using the global stage to challenge how the world sees and invests in Africa’s children.
“The world looks at African children and often sees need. Rarely as potential. I see something else,” Wawira told guests gathered at Teatro Carlo Goldoni. “The greatest concentration of builders, innovators, scientists, artists and leaders the world has ever known.”
By 2050, one in four people on Earth will be African, with a billion children coming of age. For Wawira, that demographic transformation makes investing in Africa’s children one of the defining economic questions of the century.
“The world’s largest reserve of human capital is not a projection. It’s here. Right now. Sitting in African classrooms,” she said. “I hope you will choose to see them. I hope you will choose to invest in them. But more than that, I hope you will choose to expect them.”
Wawira, the only African honoree in this year’s class, was recognized alongside actor and activist Jane Fonda; Prime Minister of Barbados, The Honourable Mia Amor Mottley; Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Lynsey Addario; and author, advocate and survivor Gisèle Pelicot. The five women were honored at the 17th Annual DVF Awards, founded by Diane von Furstenberg and the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation to recognize and support extraordinary women dedicated to transforming the lives of other women.
Mia Mottley;Wawira Njiru;Lynsey Addario;Diane Von Furstenberg;Jane Fonda;Gisele PelicotIntroducing Wawira, supermodel and entrepreneur Karlie Kloss traced a journey that began when Wawira was a 21-year-old university student determined to feed children in her community of Ruiru, Kenya and has since grown into a powerful blueprint for economic and social change.
“What makes Wawira’s achievement so remarkable is that she did not simply address a problem, she reimagined the system around it,” Kloss said, describing the solution Wawira created as “African-led, locally rooted, and built to last,” and a movement “that is changing the future of Africa.”
Wawira founded Food4Education in 2012 with a simple goal: feed 25 children so hunger would not prevent them from learning. Fourteen years later, Food4Education serves more than 660,000 meals every school day and is on track to serve one million meals daily by 2027.
But the scale of its impact extends far beyond the classroom. As governments across Africa look to build their own sustainable school feeding systems, the organization is accelerating Africa’s school feeding economy.
Food4Education has created more than 6,000 jobs across Kenya, most of them held by women, demonstrating how school feeding can function as economic infrastructure: creating jobs, supporting farmer livelihoods, strengthening local markets and investing in the human capital that will shape Africa’s future.
Diane von Furstenberg, who hosted the awards, described this year’s honorees as women who have “the courage to fight, the strength to survive and the leadership to inspire.”
Founded in 2010, The DVF Awards have recognized women from more than 30 countries for leadership across issues including climate, human trafficking, gender equality and violence prevention. Each honoree receives a grant from the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation to further the work of her nonprofit organization.
About Wawira Njiru, Founder and CEO of Food4Education
Wawira Njiru is a social innovator reimagining how the world invests in the next generation.
As the founder and CEO of Food4Education, a not-for-profit social enterprise accelerating Africa’s school feeding economy, she is helping redefine how governments, philanthropists, and institutions invest in one of the world’s most important assets: children.
Through Wawira’s leadership, F4E brings together the reach of government, the discipline of business, and clarity of mission to deliver school feeding as economic infrastructure: an engine for jobs, farmer livelihoods, local markets, and human capital that determines the future.
What began in 2012 as a passion project feeding 25 children has grown to more than 200 million meals served and counting, with more than 6,000 people employed across Kenya. Today, Food4Education’s blueprint is being adapted by governments across Africa, grounded in local realities, owned by communities, and sustained through public investment.
A World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and TED Global speaker, Wawira has been honored widely for her work, from the Skoll Award to the Audacious Project. She is driven by one conviction: that investing in the next generation is one of the smartest choices any society can make.
About Food4Education
Food4Education exists so that no child ever has to learn hungry. Since 2012, we’ve worked alongside families, schools, smallholder farmers, and governments at every level across Kenya to design and deliver school feeding, served with dignity and operated with excellence.
Powered by our digital backbone Tap2Eat, a distributed kitchen network, and a dedicated team of 6,000 and counting, we move more than 100 million meals annually from farm to spoon. Now, the blueprint we built in Kenya is in motion across the continent, fit for any local context.
Feeding kids to unlock their full potential is the heart of our work, and in doing it at scale, we’ve come to understand that the most effective school feeding is locally rooted, financially sustainable, and enduring.
That’s why we’re accelerating Africa’s school feeding economy and multiplying value for the world’s youngest continent. As a not-for-profit social enterprise, we’re bringing the reach of government, the discipline of business, and the clarity of mission to one of the smartest investments any nation can make in itself.
